September 3, 2014 AT 5:00 am

Andralys Wedding Dress Blooms with Light #WearableWednesday

What a delight to come across this beautiful wedding dress by French designer, Angélique Stock, of Andralys. Her work often crosses into fantasy, with dresses fit for medieval royalty, elven queens, and fairies. This gown reminds me of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” with its mysterious lit flowers around the neckline. Wanting to learn more about this design, I decided to write to her in the best French language I could muster, and luckily she replied.

For this dress, the idea was to make a modern/contemporary wedding dress, with a subtle Nordic inspiration, thanks to a pair of shoulders made of silk based flowers illuminated by LEDs. The Andralys universe is inspired from fantasy,and bringing light to the dress brings that touch of faery. This light had to be “chic”, meaning soft and smooth in variations.

Angelique mentioned that the lighting is inspired by her “other half” who is an electrical engineer and big Adafruit fan. I love that she created a rendering with an electronic diagram, and you can see that a GEMMA microcontroller was used along with white LED sequins.

The dress was designed specifically for an Andralys client for a music festival called “Hellfest, which looks as crazy as our “Burning Man”. Apparently there is a lot of excitement about the illuminated style.

The reactions have been very positive; in fact, light attracts the eye and really empowers the dress. As a consequence, Andralys brides now want light accessories to add some faery to their dresses.

You don’t need to wait for a wedding to add some magic to your wardrobe. Get started with our GEMMA Sequin Hat tutorial. You’ll be stitching LED sequins on all your clothes and experimenting with different light patterns with some simple programming. Create your own garden of light through the marriage of crafting and electricity.